On Jun 28, 2007, at 9:08 PM, Tom McCabe wrote:
--- Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Jun 28, 2007, at 7:35 PM, Tom McCabe wrote:
You're assuming again that consciousness is conserved.
I have no idea why you think so. I would say that
I think that each copy is conscious only of their
own particular existence,
What? If you let the copies interact with each other,
even briefly, they will realize that they are all
conscious, even if their consciousnesses are all
independent. I've been busy arguing that consciousness
is *not* conserved- if there's one you at time A, that
doesn't mean there's going to be one you at time B.
That just doesn't seem relevant to the matter at
hand. Whether or not all the copies are "really"
you isn't important for this; everyone agrees (I
think!) that they all remember being you, and that's
enough for this discussion.
His
history might be of waking up each time in the B
box,
or of waking up each time in the A box, but more
likely,
of some combination of boxes. If you follow the
"more
likely" there, I've made my point.
If you select one person at random from the copies
after they've already been copied, yes. Any given
person who wakes up is more likely to remember being
in a series of different boxes rather than all As or
all Bs. However, that does not mean that if you go to
sleep, when you wake up you will have a higher
probability of being in a "mixed-box" body than a
"same-box" body, because that doesn't even make any
sense as the "you" refers to more than one person.
It doesn't matter whether these people are "really"
"you".
it works better to look at it from the perspective
of
the guy doing the upload rather than the guy being
uploaded.
That just begs the question, though.
Which question?
We have two questions at hand, I believe:
What will a given person remember after a copying
experiment?
and
What should a person before a copying experiment
expect to remember, after the experiment? That is,
what should he anticipate?
Obviously, the only way to determine the answer to
the second question is to answer the first. Once
you've answered the first, and noted the various
answers from various viewpoints of people that all
remember being the "original", it seems obvious
that the way to handle the anticipation question
is via probability. If A goes to sleep and B and
C wake up remembering having been A, since B doesn't
remember having been C and C doesn't remember
having been B, it's clear that the original, A,
should have expected to wake up B 50%, and C 50%.
There are, after all, only 100% of cases, without
regard to the measure of people who have memories
of being A.
Therefore, restricting our investigation to the
original begs the question about what he should
expect, since we need to think about the actual
result to determine that.
Pick one. Ask him whether he remembers waking up
10 times or 1024. If 10, then he had a 50% chance
each time of waking up in the A box.
Again, you've got to be careful using "he" here. This
time it does work, because you can trace the copy's
history back in such a manner that you're only
referring to one person when you talk about past
events. If you were doing a contraction- taking two
persons, averaging their brain state, and waking the
average up- then this wouldn't work, because if you
interviewed the contraction you would get a whole
jumble of contradictory memories.
This seems like a tangent, and I'm not sure what
my thoughts about such a "contraction" would be.
I agree that introducing contractions would muddy
the waters considerably, but hopefully by leaving
them out, we can find our way to a resolution.
I strongly doubt he'll remember all
1024 awakenings.
Why should there be any doubt whatsoever? This is a
matter of physics, here.
I was understating. Perhaps a smilie would have
been in order. :)
--
Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"If we have matter duplicators, will each of us be a sovereign
and possess a hydrogen bomb?" -- Jerry Pournelle
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